Open Access approaching: University of Miami and University of Liège

I am always pleased when I can write about new and interesting Open Access initiatives, which show that the OA movement is spreading across the scientific community worldwide. Almost every week we read or hear about universities and institutions which introduce new OA policies, launch repositories or bring out open journals that help scholars to adopt Open Access. Today I would like to introduce two fine examples of this kind of initiative at the University of Miami and the University of Liège.

The University of Miami within cooperation with the Otto G. Richter Library, the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science Library, the Louis Calder Memorial Library at the Miller School of Medicine, the Marta and Austin Weeks Music Library, the Paul Buisson Reference Library, and the Judi Prokop Newman Information Resources Center launched some time ago the Scholarly Repository. It features selected research and scholarly works prepared by the faculty, students, and staff at the University of Miami. Scholars and students can find here theses and dissertations, journals and peer-reviewed series, articles, conference papers, proceedings, lectures, projects, reports, and presentations categorized by collections, disciplines and authors. The Scholarly Repository holds almost 6,000 papers, which have been downloaded 323,989 times (more than 200,000 in the previous year).

The Scholarly Repository is a good example of cooperation between universities’ libraries, aimed at offering Open Access content to academics and students. The accumulation of scientific papers is growing every year and by increasing access to knowledge for researchers, it contributes to the development of science in general.

The second example comes from the University of Liège, which in cooperation with the University of Luxembourg announced the commencement of ORBilu – a new archive server of the University of Luxembourg. Twenty-four hours after it went online, some 100 articles were deposited. After two days, ORBilu had reached over 400 publications for a university with only 1,300 faculty members. Moreover, the University of Luxembourg has also introduced a new OA policy in connection with ORBilu:

“Concretely, the University of Luxembourg requires all University members to deposit:

1. Full-text electronic copies of all peer-reviewed articles and papers from published conference proceedings published from 1 January 2009 onwards; and

2. Bibliographic references of all their scientific production published since 1 January 2009.

As of 1 January 2014, only publications referenced in said repository and deposited following the rules laid out above will be taken into consideration for:

The official list of publications for the University’s annual activity report;

The official list of publications for the University’s performance contract;

These two cases show that the implementation of Open Access is not just a temporary trend in some scientific communities or universities, but that its reach is global, with institutions and governments across the world actively promoting this mode of scientific exchange.

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5 Comments

thank you for your report on both Open Access repositories form the University of Liège (Belgium) and its little brother ORBilu from the University of Luxembourg (Grand Duchy of Luxembour).
Just to clarify, ORBi has been developed based on DSpace software by the University of Liège in 2008. It has now more than 95000 references (60% with a fulltext). This University also created a new form of OA policy called “immediate deposit / optional access”.

ORBilu is the new repository of the University of Luxembourg (a different University) which decided to follow the same way as in Liège and so a partnership exists but ORBi and ORBilu are two disctinct platforms.
You could create a confusion among your readers if your “ORBilu” link refers in fact to the ORBi ULg repository.

ORBiLu starded in April 2013 but ORBi was launched in 2008 with a very strong mandate (the ULg mandate). ORBi holds now 95,400 references of ULg faculties publications; 58,200 of them with full text. We observe more than 1.5 billion downloads since the launch (more than 70,000/month).

ORBiLu is thus the little brother of ORBi

Kind regards

Paul Thirion
Head librarian of University of Liege
Project manager of ORBi (Open Repository and Bibliography of University of Liege)

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